Stop Making SQL Server Weird, Microsoft.

Ledgers And Tridents And Toads, Fido-hmy

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With every release of SQL Server, Microsoft adds in a bunch of tadpole features. It’s up to those tadpoles to survive long enough to turn into beautiful uh… Frogs Toads.

The way they do that is by having enough paying customers use them — usually prodded by #MVPBuzz chasers — to get continued support and development.

All of this is subject to internal whims (like Microsoft rebranding, renaming, or rebasing a feature, take Mirroring >> Availability Groups), and external customer fancies (Tableau vs PowerBI, etc).

I feel bad for folks who latch onto these things with any sort of seriousness, like Big Data Clusters, or any of the dozens of other features that died before they could bump their butts on a log.

One marvels at the sheer number of “you better get on board” style session titles that have been molded around features where absolutely no one got on board.

Even Kubernetes (which I know isn’t a SQL Server feature) is sort of like K-Pop: Apparently millions of people like it, but I’ve never met a single person who actually uses it.

Maybe it’s more like a bot net. K-Bot? Not sure, here. I’m bad at creative writing.

They Don’t Like You Anyway

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Microsoft has this weird perceived popularity issue.  Perhaps it’s the diminishing self-esteem that comes with age, with SQL Server turning 30-something and all. Microsoft keeps trying to make SQL Server appeal to swaths of people who will never like it, because it’s not the shiny new thing on the block.

They won’t love you like I do.

Adding in every passing fad to the product to try to stay young and hip does a great disservice to the product as a whole, which has many addressable flaws. Microsoft dedicates countless development cycles to goofy memes that will wither on the vine shortly after the first version.

Imagine if cars still came with cassette players, but not ones that can do anything cool like play both sides without flipping the tape over, or being able to fast forward or rewind to the start or end of a track.

You’d basically have Spatial Data And The Graph Nodes in your car trying to play Garage Days Re-Re-Revisited.

Duets

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I do wish the Microsoft bean counters would dance with who they brung a bit more. You know, people who need a relational database with as few bugs and preventable performance issues as possible, with useful development features, and a coherent toolset?

Clearing the minefield of pitfalls that developers fall int0 (hello, MERGE!) would allow less effort to be spent on chasing down oddball problems and more time spent developing quality features.

It’s sort of like if I had a keyboard that fixed all my typos immediately, I’d have more time to write quality blog posts that don’t need several editorial passes.

Maybe someday.

Thanks for reading!

Going Further

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